My network status says I'm connected to wired network but firefox gives me a server cannot be found message.This is only at work. At home I have no issues with the same system.At work, i have plenty of other systems running on the network without any problems.

I'm a complete newb here and have no linux troubleshooting skills.

I was able to ping my router a 192.168.10.1and here is what ifconfig gave me

Well you have to set up a proper dns server. your router is obviously not performing that function. The only way I know how to do this is to access your router web interface (in other words, you open your web browser and type:

This will open your routers interface and ask you for the username and password - I hope you remember what those are.

What you get after that depends on what router you are using. On my Netgear one I go to "Basic Settings" and in the section titled "Domain Name Server (DNS) Address" I click the "use these dns servers" radio button and in the primary and secondary dns servers boxes I enter

Primary DNS ... 202.67.222.222Secondary DNS ... 202.67.220.220

That is because I am using 'OpenDNS'. There are many DNS servers so for example if you wanted to use the google servers you would enter:

Primary DNS ... 8.8.8.8Secondary DNS ... 8.8.4.4

Which has the advantage of being easier to remember.

Alternatively you can use the ones provided by your isp if you know what they are.

In either case you have to click 'Apply' followed by 'Logout' in the router admin window.

There may be an easier way but I don't know it and that should work anyway.

Went into router configuration, changed DNS servers to googles DNS. Applied and restarted router.I'm still getting the same "server cannot be found" and nslookup still gives me "no servers could be reached".

Should I try manually setting up the ip and dns server addresses through linux mint's network manager? If so, what do I put in under 'Search Domain'? I'm not familiar with that option.

Paranoidx wrote:Went into router configuration, changed DNS servers to googles DNS. Applied and restarted router.I'm still getting the same "server cannot be found" and nslookup still gives me "no servers could be reached".

Should I try manually setting up the ip and dns server addresses through linux mint's network manager? If so, what do I put in under 'Search Domain'? I'm not familiar with that option.

Give it a try, but I don't know what 'search domains' is supposed to be, all I can tell you is that in all of my connections that setting is blank (although I didn't set my connections up manually you understand). Anyway blank is how I would leave it.

Is this definitely a Mint problem or could there possibly be something wrong with the router, or your isp or phone line, anything like that? I had a problem like that a few years back and it turned out my adsl line filter was faulty - not easy to diagnose unless you replace it with a new one.

Have you got any other machines connected to this router and if so do they work normally?

Put in manual settings through the network manager and was unsuccessful.

Yes, I have other computers running windows that have no issue connecting. Also, my linux mint system was having no problems connecting to my home network. It only started giving me issues when I tried to connect it to my work network, which also has many windows systems running without any problems.

Ok I don't know much about Linux, still a newbie myself but I am thinking perhaps this could be an issue with firewalls your work might have on their network. Especially if you work for a big company. I saw you said Windows works fine there. So they likely would have it set up to handle anything Windows. Perhaps even Mac. Linux not being mainstream, might have more problems though.

changed /etc/resolv.conf into a symlink after reading another thread and also commented out dns=dnsmasq in networkmanager.conf. Now, the browser tells me the server cannot be found right away instead of trying to resolve DNS.

and look the content of the file (more info about this file). If the list is long or contains weird domain names, it's likely that the problem is coming from there. It might be due to automatic changes in configurations, for instance when you switch from one network to another, etc... My problem was coming from here, some domain name related to my work network were messing up with the resolver.

How to correct it (what worked for me): Resetting the file.

Copy-paste the content of resolv.conf in a new file in order to have a back-up. Then do:

for what its worth. If you are having problems getting your routers nameservers to change. You can just add the google or opendns nameservers into resolv.conf directly and bypass your router alltogether.